8.31am: David Cameron has suffered his first proper rebellion in the Commons. As Patrick Wintour reports in the Guardian, the alternative vote referendum bill was passed last night at second reading by a majority of 59.

This probably won't alarm the prime minister too much as he returns to work after his two weeks' paternity leave. Cameron is chairing a meeting of the cabinet at 9am. Other items on the diary for today include:

9.15am: Frank Field, the Labour former minister who is now advising the government on poverty, is speaking at an Institute for Fiscal Studies seminar on child poverty.

12.30pm: John Yates, the Metropolitan police assistant commissioner, is giving evidence to the Commons home affairs committee. He is due to speak about counter-terrorism and royal protection, but he is also going to be asked about the News of the World phone hacking investigation.

"An ordained Church of England minister, Green has spoken publicly since the financial crisis about the need for the banking sector to rediscover its ethics and make corporate social responsibility a priority."

9.06am: William Hague has used Twitter to describe the allegations made about his sexuality as "a big lie". This is what he posted last night:

Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, was on the Today programme early this morning defending his plans. According to PoliticsHome (paywall), he said civil service redundancy arrangements were "completely out of kilter" with what happens in other areas of the public sector and the private sector.

Most people, low paid workers in the private sector, get no more than a statutory redundancy scheme ... We want there to be a proper long term agreed settlement here. Particularly one that gives protection to lower paid workers.

We all believe that the civil service compensation scheme needs to be reformed and that its costs need to be reduced. But reform needs to be fair. The superannuation bill fails to meet this test. It provides inadequate protection for some of the lowest-paid and longest-serving public sector workers.

No protection is offered for the lowest-paid, with a junior official in a job centre receiving no more assistance than a permanent secretary of a government department. We believe that the principles of the February 2010 scheme, introduced by the previous government, provided a basis for a fair way forward.

10.25am: All today's Guardian political stories are on the website here. And the stories filed yesterday, which include some in today's paper, are here.

As for the rest of the papers, here's my pick of the highlights.

•The Daily Telegraph says Theresa May, the home secretary, will announce a review of extradition arrangements with the US and the EU.

Under the review, which could be announced as soon as Wednesday, the Home Secretary's hand could be strengthened and foreign authorities could be required to provide more evidence before British courts grant a request. A panel of lawyers and international relations experts, led by a judge, will also examine whether suspects accused of crimes that took place mostly in this country but affected foreign citizens should be tried at home.

•Greg Hurst in the Times (paywall) says that student debt could rise to an average of £25,000 under plans for higher tuition fees expected to be recommended by Lord Browne. Hurst says Browne has rejected the idea of a graduate tax.

His review team, which discussed a draft report yesterday for publication on October 11, was not persuaded by a graduate contribution collected via the tax system, which breaks the link between the student and university.

One option is a new limit on state funding per student, with universities funding the balance on teaching costs themselves. This would allow the cap on fees to be lifted altogether but would act as a disincentive to costly courses.

Another is for banks, not the Treasury, to lend the upfront cost of tuition to universities and recover the money in graduate loan repayments.

•Andrew Grice in the Independent says a ComRes poll shows that almost 40% of people who voted Lib Dem at the general election would not vote for the party now.

•The Daily Mail says 1.4 million Britons are being urged to use a little-known loophole to reject attempts by HM Revenue and Customs to reclaim unpaid tax.

Accountants have revealed that under a technicality, called the 'A19: Extra-Statutory Concession', the law states that HMRC may have to write-off the money. There is no limit to the amount of money which can be written off under this concession. Under the working of the A19 concession, it states HMRC will back down if the victim 'could reasonably have believed that his or her tax affairs were in order'.

In an interview with the German business newspaper Handelsblatt, he said Britain was now a much wealthier country than in the 1980s and could afford to pay more.

Mr Lewandowski, who is also pressing for the EU to be allowed to levy its own taxes, added: 'In my opinion, the discount for Great Britain has lost its original legitimacy. The structure of the EU budget has changed substantially.

'The portion of agricultural spending - and that was the original justification for the discount - has clearly sunk.'

•Andy McSmith in the Independent profiles Ralph Miliband, the father of David and Ed, a D-Day veteran, and the Marxist intellectual who inspired figures like Paul Foot and Tariq Ali.

It is a matter of plain fact that neither David nor Ed Miliband can be called a socialist under any definition of the word that their father would have used. The brothers have both accepted the existence of the capitalist system as an established fact, and interpret socialism as a mission to combat its injustices and protect its potential victims ...

There is a nobility and a drama in the life of Ralph Miliband that is lacking in the steady, pragmatic political careers of his sons. But the brothers are arguing about what can be done now. By contrast, waiting for Ralph Miliband's vision of the future to come to pass could be like waiting for Godot.

•The Independent says that former Tory MP Sir Peter Viggers has sold the duck house which became a symbol of the expenses scandal, with the proceeds going to charity.

Boris Johnson. Photograph: Rex Features

10.40am: Boris Johnson has just been on Sky suggesting that he might resign if the government cuts the funding for Crossrail.

I am very, very determined to get my point across to government of whatever stripe that it would be completely mad, nuts, bonkers to cut projects like Crossrail, like the tube upgrades, like Thameslink, things that will deliver benefits for our city, not just in the next five or 10 years, but in 20, 30 years ... We cannot afford to take short-term decisions that would greatly reduce the ability of London to compete and would reduce the quality of life for people living and working in London. I'm not prepared to accept that.

On his London blog, my colleague Dave Hill says that Johnson has been coming up with quite a lot of this talk in the last few days, even though it is fairly clear that Crossrail and the tube upgrades will survive "largely unscathed" from the spending cuts. Dave offers this explanation as to what Johnson is up to.

Boris's public indignation should be interpreted in the context of his re-election hopes and the extent of David Cameron's concern at the prospect of his instead opting out of the tricky business of defending City Hall in 2012 and returning to parliament to make a nuisance of himself. The Tory mayor wants to give the Tory-led government every incentive to look after London, while at the same time seeking to convince Londoners that if the government hacks a great hole in the rest of his transport plans it won't be because Good Old Boris didn't do his darndest to prevent it.

11.15am: The government's fixed-term parliaments bill is in trouble. Malcolm Jack, the clerk of the House of Commons, has been giving evidence about it to a committee of MPs this morning and, essentially, he seems to have said that Nick Clegg's plan to pass a law saying that parliaments should normally last for five years is full of holes.

The bill, which is due to get its second reading in the Commons shortly, says that every parliament should last for five years unless the government loses a vote of confidence and no alternative government is formed within 14 days.

But Jack told the Commons political and constitutional reform committee that the bill would be vulnerable to legal challenge in the courts. "The possible areas of challenge are wide-ranging," Jack said in a written submission. "For example, any interested party (which given the subject of the motion could be widely interpreted) could challenge whether a motion for dissolution had been correctly worded and processed."

Jack raised the prospect of a decision about whether or not there would be a general election having to be decided in the courts.

This is embarrassing for Clegg, who as deputy prime minister is in charge of the governement's constitutional reform programme. Jack is not just constitutional rent-a-quote. He is parliament's most senior legislative expert.

Jack offered a solution. He suggested that the government should give up the bill and try to ensure that Britain has fixed-term parliaments by changing parliamentary standing orders (the House of Commons's in-house rule book). This would "avoid the constitutional innovation of moving such matters into the judicial province and so leave undisturbed the House's mastery of its own proceedings", Jack said in his memo.

I was not at the hearing, but my colleague Patrick Wintour heard it all. He'll be filing a full story later.

11.39am: Frank Field will be sending his poverty recommendations to David Cameron next week. And he will be "advocating a range of intelligent interventions that radically alter what would otherwise be the current fate of poorer children".

•Field said he will recommend "a range of intelligent interventions" that will improve the prospects of poor children before they reach the age of five. He cited research showing that, by the time children turn up at school, those from low-income families are already more likely to be at the bottom range of abilities.

We have not fallen into the trap of what some neuroscientists call the 'the baby determinist' syndrome. The review will not be arguing that the only guide to influencing the outcome of a child's life is during the crucial first three years when so much of the early brain network is formed. But neither will we be saying the opposite; that it doesn't matter too much what happens to children at the early stages of life because they can make up for a poor start later. Later interventions do look much less cost-effective, and in general a programme of later interventions – that taxpayers know as schools – seems not to have that much impact on equalising those gross inequalities present as children cross the school threshold for the first time.

•Field said that he wanted to stop poverty being something that was self-perpetuating.

I hope I have conveyed to you why there is a sense of excitement amongst the review team. That excitement comes from seeing if it is possible to build up a new framework so that it becomes impossible to predict a life on low income for children coming from the poorest homes.

•Field said that he and his team were trying to construct an "index of life opportunities". He said this would run alongside the conventional measure of poverty – below 60% of median earnings - because the standard poverty measure "focused too little interest in how we might radically transform the life chances of those children who will otherwise be set on a diet of low pay and unemployment until the end of time".

•He said that he would send a report to Cameron next week containing some of his main recommendations. He wants Cameron to have this before the governement concludes its spending review. Field also said that he sent Cameron an early report about his thinking before the summer recess.

He was talking about the spending review. He said that there were "signficant challenges ahead" for the government and that there was a "very challenging financial backdrop" to the review of departmental spending.

12.14pm: Here's a lunchtime summary.

•The TUC has launched a campaign urging the public to join the unions in opposing public service cuts. "The poll tax was defeated when government MPs returned to Westminster to report that their constituencies were in revolt," said Brendan Barber, the TUC's general secretary, speaking ahead of next week's TUC annual conference. "The poll tax offended the British people's basic sense of what's fair. So will the spending cuts. Every coalition MP with a small majority and every coalition MP who fought an election to oppose deep early cuts needs to feel the pressure from their constituents to change course."

•Stephen Green, the HSBC chairman, is poised to join the government as a trade minister. Downing Street said this morning that a formal announcement would be made "shortly".

•A survey of Labour councillors has shown that David Miliband is attracting the most support. "Of the 265 Labour councillors in England and Wales contacted by ComRes, David Miliband received the largest level of first preference support, 88 councillors (33%), Ed Miliband came second with 69 (26%), Diane Abbott third with 55 (21%), Andy Burnham fourth with 33 (12%), with Ed Balls coming last with 20 (8%)." The survey was commissioned by the BBC's Daily Politics show.

•Frank Field has said that his poverty review will recommend "intelligent interventions" aimed at the under-fives. He said he wanted to "build up a new framework so that it becomes impossible to predict a life on low income for children coming from the poorest homes". (See 11.39am)

12.31pm: John Yates, the Metropolitan police assistant commissioner, will start giving evidence to the Commons home affairs committee shortly.

Normally, I listen to these hearings using the parliamentary video feed – but it seems to be on the blink today, so I'll be covering it with my laptop from the committee room.

The committee has been hearing evidence since 11am, starting with a session on immigration. But Yates has been invited to talk about specialist operations. The committee has said that it wants to ask him about about topical aspects of his role, particularly in relation to royal protection and counter-terrorism.

But Keith Vaz, the former Labour minister who chairs the committee, said yesterday he would also allow a few questions about the News of the World phone hacking affair.

What are they going to ask? Well, they could do a lot worse than follow Nick Davies's advice. In the Guardian today, he has been looking at some of the things Yates said about phone hacking in his Today programme interview yesterday and highlighting the flaws. Here's a flavour:

Asked if there would be another investigation: "We have always said that if any new material, new evidence, was produced, we would consider it."

This precisely misses the point, which is that since 2006, Scotland Yard has been sitting on a mass of evidence which it has not investigated and not disclosed. It needs no new evidence to reopen an inquiry which was never completed in the first place.

Asked if the only reporter he talked to at the News of the World about the hacking allegations was the royal correspondent: "No. That is not the case."

This looks misleading. All of the available information confirms that Scotland Yard failed to interview any reporter or editor or manager from the News of the World other than the royal correspondent, Clive Goodman. And that includes failing to interview reporters who were explicitly identified in evidence as having handled intercepted voicemail messages.

Asked if the Met had talked to Sean Hoare, the former News of the World reporter who has said that Andy Coulson was aware of widespread hacking at the tabloid during the original investigation: "This is the first time we have heard of Mr Hoare or anything he's had to say. He wasn't part of the inquiry … We are surprised that the New York Times did not avail us of this information earlier than they did."

Hoare is one of a dozen reporters who spoke to the New York Times about phone hacking under Andy Coulson. A dozen have also spoken to the Guardian. It is not clear why Scotland Yard detectives would need American reporters to introduce them to journalists in London. As stated above, they have chosen not to approach any serving or former reporters other than Clive Goodman.

Select committees aren't always particularly good at forensic questioning, and Yates may find that he gets an easy right. We'll see in a moment.

12.37pm: The immigration session has over-run by a few minutes. Yates will be coming up soon.

12.45pm: Vaz says he is going to start with phone hacking. He says Andy Coulson has said he is happy to meet the police. When will Yates, or his team, meet him?

Yates says he will take this "stage by stage". The Sean Hoare comments do constitute "new material". The police will see him first. But, "at some stage", he expects to see Coulson.

Vaz asks when the police will interview Hoare. Yates says he has written to the New York Times today asking if it will release the material it collected.

The NYT has said that it will not give the police any information that is not in its article, but Yates says he wants to try one more time. After he gets a response, the police will speak to Hoare.

12.48pm: Yates says phone hacking is "very difficult to prove".

Vaz asks if it is true that the police recovered 91 telephone pin numbers. Yates says the number varies between 91 and 120.

Vaz says Chris Bryant was one of the names on the "91" list. Simon Hughes was another. But Bryant and Hughes are not members of the royal family, and therefore were probably not being targeted by the News of the World's royal correspondent, he suggests. Have the police written to the people on the list to tell them they were on the list?

Yates says he does not want to discuss individuals. But he adds that the police have taken "all reasonable steps" to warn individuals where the police think they have had their phones hacked.

12.54pm: Mary Macleod asks Yates what "all reasonable steps" means, and how many people have been contacted.

Yates says Macleod is assuming crimes have been committed, but it is hard to prove that these offences have been committed. He says this only applies in the case of 10 to 12 individuals.

David Winnick asks Yates if Bryant was notified by the police (Bryant told MPs yesterday that he did not find out his name was on the list until he asked the police himself).

Yates declines to answer. Vaz and Winnick complain about his refusal to respond. Yates says the Met have been in correspondence with Bryant for some time.

Winnick asks Yates if he would be opposed to HM Inspectorate of Constabulary being involved.

Yates says that is a matter for the home secretary. He says he still considers the original investigation a success. Two people were convicted, and a strong deterrent message was sent out.

12.59pm: Julian Huppert, a Liberal Democrat member of the committee, says he has told Vaz he thinks the committee should investigate this affair in more detail.

Yates says it may have been better if the police had interviewed "the Neville person" (Neville Thurlbeck, the News of the World's chief reporter, who was named on correspondence relating to phone hacking) at the time of the original investigation.

Vaz asks about newspapers paying police officers. Yates says this has happened in the past. Officers have been disciplined or fired.

1.03pm: Aidan Burley asks whether Yates thinks there should be a new inquiry by an outside body.

Yates says the police investigation should be allowed to take its course. After that, it would be up to the home secretary to decide whether there should be another review of the case.

Alun Michael asks whether there is a "live investigation" taking place now. Yates says it's a matter of semantics. He would say the police were considering new material.

Hoare has made some "very serious allegations", Yates says. The police have to look into them.

1.14pm: Stephen McCabe asks about the revelation that the original inquiry found nearly 3,000 people had been targeted. Will Yates clarify the numbers?

Yates says the original charges reflected the "range of criminality" involved. He says he accepts that the numbers mentioned have been "confusing" to members of the public and will consider whether more needs to be done to provide reassurance.

Vaz says the committee will decide what it wants to do further after this session. He is implying that it may hold a full inquiry (as Julian Huppert proposed).

Vaz is now asking about royal protection (and not getting very far – Yates seems to be very reluctant to say anything that could compromise security).

I think we've had all we're going to get on phone hacking. I'll sum up what we learnt in a moment.

1.28pm: John Yates wasn't particularly forthcoming with the home affairs committee. He was reluctant to discuss any individual phone-hacking cases, and at various points he told MPs these offences were difficult to prove and may have happened a long time ago. But we did glean a few things:

•Yates said that he expected to speak to Andy Coulson about the affair. Yesterday, Coulson said he would be happy to be interviewed by the police in relation to phone hacking (Coulson has repeatedly denied any knowledge of phone hacking by his staff when he was editor of the News of the World).

•Yates admitted the original investigation could have been more thorough. He said it would have been better if Neville Thurlbeck, the News of the World's chief reporter (who is named in one document apparently relating to phone hacking) had been interviewed by the police.

•Yates refused to say who was on the list of people who may have had their phones hacked, but did say John Prescott was not on the list. Yates also insisted that being on a list did not mean someone's phone had been hacked. The police only found evidence of crimes being committed in about 12 cases, he said.

•Keith Vaz, the committee chairman, suggested the committee was considering holding a full inquiry into the affair.

1.41pm: The hearing is now over. Back to the office.

2.07pm: Here are some of Yates's quotes from the hearing.

On interviewing Andy Coulson:

I imagine that we will be meeting with Mr Coulson at some point.

On Lord Prescott:

Lord Prescott has discussed the fact that he may have been on a list [of targets for phone hacking]. He is not on that list. And he has never been hacked, to my knowledge.

On the number of cases where a crime was committed:

We can only prove a crime against a very few number of people. That number is in the low tens, about 10 to 12 people.

On flaws in the original investigation:

It may have been better if we did interview the Neville person then [Neville Thurlbeck, the News of the World's chief reporter], but we didn't.

2.19pm: Downing Street has confirmed that Stephen Green, the HSBC chairman, has been appointed as trade minister.

He will report jointly to the business secretary and the foreign secretary when he starts his job at the beginning of next year, and will also take a seat in the Lords.

In a statement, David Cameron said: "Working across the department for business and the Foreign Office, this role reflects the enormous importance this government places on forging strong international relationships to open new trade links, promote British business overseas and maximise inward investment to the UK."

2.57pm: In the comments (at 9.29am) yahyah posted this:

Would you please ask Lib Dem HQ whether Clegg thinks that having a Murdochite inside No 1O is the real threat to our civil liberties not speed cameras and CCTV? Clegg is getting an easy ride over this and usually he is rent a gob for perceived civil liberty abuses.

I thought it was a fair point and I sent an email to Lib Dem HQ. No reply. I tried another Lib Dem press adviser. No reply. But I finally found another Lib Dem aide at large in the press gallery. So what did he have to say about Nick Clegg's views on the Andy Coulson affair. "I don't really want to get into this," he replied.

3.05pm: Ed Miliband has issued a statement responding to the Times story about Lord Browne ruling out a graduate tax. (See 10.25am.) Miliband says that if he becomes Labour leader and the coalition tries to implement the proposals floated in the Times, he will work with the Lib Dems to try to defeat them. (Under the coalition agreement, the Lib Dems have the right not to back the Browne proposals - whatever they are.) This is what Miliband said:

Higher and variable tuition fees would create an unwanted market in higher education and limit the opportunities and aspirations of thousands of young people. If the coalition government come forward with plans for higher and variable tuition fees, I will work with those Liberal Democrat MPs who stand by their manifesto commitment, and I will work to defeat those plans in parliament.

3.16pm: The Cabinet Office has rejected Malcolm Jack's comments about the fixed-term parliaments bill. (See 11.15am.) A spokesman said Jack was wrong to worry about legislation being vulnerble to legal challenge because "it is not realistic to expect that the courts would start trespassing on such highly-politicised issues and matters related to the internal workings of parliament". He said the Bill of Rights specifies that the courts should not interfer with "proceedings in parliament".

The spokesman also pointed out that the bill says decisions taken by the Speaker relating to dissolution would be "conclusive for all purposes", meaning that they would be non-justifiable. He also said that if the government tried to introduce fixed terms using Commons standing orders, those orders could be suspended by a simple majority vote in the Commons.

It sends a message to each backbench Conservative MP, namely, that the prime minister thinks that he's not up to the job, and that none of his colleagues are, either. David Cameron is sending his MPs the opposite of the famous old L'Oreal slogan. His message is: "Because you're not worth it." This is, as the whips would put it, "unwise".

•Paul Waugh on his blog says today's Daily Politics poll of Labour councillors (see 12.14pm) challenges the notion that Ed Miliband will always get more second preference votes than David.

•Iain Dale on his blog says that Michael McManus is writing a book about homosexuality in the Conservative party and that he would like to hear from people with a relevant story to tell. Dale also wants to know whether he can get away with Queer Blue Water as a title.

3.56pm: My colleague Afua Hirsch, the Guardian's legal affairs correspondent, says that exerts have challenged what John Yates said about the law on phone hacking. She's filed this.

Addressing the home affairs select committee, John Yates, the assistant Metropolitan police commissioner, repeated earlier claims by police that cases of hacking into voicemails could only be prosecuted if the victim had not yet listened to their messages.

"That is nonsense, and a recurring problem with this police position in this case," said Simon Mackay, author of Covert Policing Law & Practice.

"The police are getting confused about a number of things relating to the evidential status of a voicemail. The law is that in the nano-second between someone's voice being converted into an electromagnetic system and being transmitted to the recipient who listens to the voicemail, that's the course of transmission. At some point between these two points the hacker has been diverting a copy for his own use, and that is an offence."

3.57pm: Tony Blair doesn't write about God much in his autobiography. Der Spiegel has asked him about this in an interview. This exchange was particularly good.

SPIEGEL: So God never spoke to you directly?

Blair: Your faith gives you strength to do what you think is right and obviously it gives you values. But that's it. You can't go into the corner and ask God what the minimum wage should be next year.

4.04pm: William Hague posted a tweet last night saying that people had been "very supportive" since he made a statement last week denying that he was having an affair with a male aide and revealing that his wife has had several miscarriages. (See 9.06am.) But what do the public think? I've finally found a YouGov poll (pdf) on it. Asked if they thought Hague was telling the truth about not having an affair, 46% said he was telling the truth and 12% said he wasn't. Some 42% said they didn't know.

A majority of respondents thought he was right to issue a statement. But YouGov also found that 43% of respondents said he had made an error of judgment sharing a hotel room with an aide, while 42% said he had not made an error of judgment.

4.12pm: I'm about to wrap up. First, here's an afternoon summary:

•MPs have launched an inquiry into phone hacking. Keith Vaz, chairman of the Commons home affairs committee, said just now that his committee would hold an inquiry into the phone hacking, covering the definition of such offences and how the police are investigating them.

"The evidence of Assistant Commissioner John Yates today raised a number questions of importance about the law on phone hacking, the way the police deal with such breaches of the law and the manner in which victims are informed of those breaches. I hope that this inquiry will clarify all these important areas," Vaz said. It is not clear yet whether this will lead to Andy Coulson being called to give evidence.

•Chris Bryant, the Labour former minister, said he was writing to all MPs encouraging them to contact the Metropolian police to find out whether they are likely to have had their phones hacked.

Commenting on Yates's evidence to the home affairs committee (see 1.28pm) Bryant said: "John Yates made clear in his evidence today that he does not see it as his or the Met's responsibility to make all individuals aware of attempts made to invade their privacy. He in effect, seems to be saying that we as MPs, celebrities and other public figures will have to conduct our own investigations to get to the bottom of how pervasive these practices were"

•Downing Street has confirmed that Stephen Green will join the government as trade minister after he steps down as HSBC chairman later this year. (See 2.19pm)

•The Cabinet Office has rejected a suggestion from the clerk of the Commons, parliament's most senior legislative expert, that it should shelve the fixed-term parliaments bill. Malcolm Jack, the clerk, said the bill would be vulnerable to legal challenge. But the Cabinet Office says Jack's comments are "not realistic". (See 11.15am and 3.16pm)